The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - Eudora Welty [327]
There, lying on the barrel in front of me, looking vaguely like a piece of worn harness, was an object which I slowly recognized as once beloved to me It was a stereopticon. It belonged in the parlor, on the lower shelf of the round table in the middle of the room, with the Bible on the top. It belonged to Sunday and to summertime.
My held hand pained me through the wish to use it and lift that old, beloved, once mysterious contraption to my eyes, and dissolve my sight, all our sights, in that. In that delaying, binding pain, I remembered Uncle Felix. That is, I remembered the real Uncle Felix, and could hear his voice, respectful again, asking the blessing at the table. Then I heard the cataract of talk, which I knew he engendered; that was what Sunday at Mingo began with.
I remembered the house, the real house, always silvery, as now, but then cypressy and sweet, cool, reflecting, dustless. Sunday dinner was eaten from the table pulled to the very head of the breezeway, almost in the open door. The Sunday air poured in through it, and through the frail-ribbed fanlight and side lights, down on the island we made, our cloth and our food and our flowers and jelly and our selves, so lightly enclosed there—as though we ate in pure running water. So many people were gathered at Mingo that the Sunday table was pulled out to the limit, from a circle to the shape of our race track. It held my mother, my father and brother; Aunt Ethel; Uncle Harlan, who could be persuaded, if he did not eat too much, to take down the banjo later; my Jerrold grandmother, who always spoke of herself as "nothing but a country bride, darling," slicing the chicken while Uncle Felix cut the ham; Cousin Eva and Cousin Archie; and Kate, Kate everywhere, like me. And plenty more besides; it was eating against talking, all as if nobody would ever be persuaded to get up and leave the table: everybody, we thought, that we needed. And some were so pretty!
And when they were, the next thing, taking their naps all over the house, it was then I got my chance, and there would be, in lieu of any nap, pictures of the world to see.
I ran right through, with the stereopticon, straight for the front porch steps, and sitting there, stacked the slides between my bare knees in the spread of my starched skirt. The slide belonging on top was "The Ladies' View, Lakes of Killarney."
And at my side sat Uncle Felix.
That expectation—even alarm—that the awareness of happiness can bring! Of any happiness. It need not even be yours. It is like being able to prophesy, all of a sudden. Perhaps Uncle Felix loved the stereopticon most; he had it first. With his coat laid folded on the porch floor on the other side of him, sitting erect in his shirtsleeves for this, he would reach grandly for the instrument as I ran bringing it out. He saddled his full-size nose with the stereopticon and said, "All right, Skeeta." And then as he signaled ready for each slide, I handed it up to him.
Some places took him a long time. As he perspired there in his hard collar, looking, he gave off a smell like a cut watermelon. He handed each slide back without a word, and I was ready with the next. I would no more have spoken than I would have interrupted his blessing at the table.
Eventually they—all the rest of the Sunday children—were awake and wanting to be tossed about, and they hung over him, pulling on him, seeking his lap, his shoulders, pinning him down, riding on him. And he with his giant size and absorption went on looking his fill. It was as though, while he held the